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Default Metapost has the concept of two types of labels, postscript labels and TeX labels. Postscript labels are created using

label("text", location);

while TeX labels are created using

label(btex text etex, location);

In the latter case, Metapost collects everything between btex and etex in a separate file, processes that file through TeX, and includes the resulting postscript code at an appropriate location. Such a Golberg-esque mechanism is needed to propertly typeset mathematics, get proper kerning, etc.; tasks that TeX can do but Postscript cannot.

ConTeXt has always been tightly integrated with Metapost, but in the pdftex days typesetting labels was slow. ConTeXt (i.e. pdftex) calls Metapost (to draw a figure, say), and then Metapost calls pdftex (to typeset a label), and imports the result to the postscript; this postscript file is passed to ConTeXt and translated into PDF code using TeX macros and the result in inserted in the PDF file that pdftex is generating. Phew!

Six or seven years ago, Hans Hagen and Mojca Miklavec had an idea to speed up this process by collecting all the labels at the ConTeXt end, typesetting them in boxes, and pass on the dimension of the boxes to Metapost. See Mojca’s My Way describing this mechanism. To use this feature, one had to type:

label(\sometxt{text}, location);

With luatex, Metapost can be called as a library, and the basic idea of preprocessing the labels at the TeX end and passing the resulting dimensions to Metapost has been implemented more robustly in Lua. (The conversion of the PS generated by Metapost to PDF is also done in Lua). So one could just type

label(btex text etex, location);

and ConTeXt would parse the Metapost environment and do all the book-keeping at the back.

However, I had always been unstastified with the user interface. There are very few situations where I as a user want postscript labels. So, why not redefine the label macro so that

label("text", location);

is equivalent to the btex … etex version. I had made such a suggestion back in 2007, and for some years had been using a private macro for such purposes.

Today, while answering a question at TEX.SX, I noticed that now there is no difference between the postscript and the TeX labels!. For example

Notice that both w and p are in the Times Math font. So, there is no need for those pesky btex ... etex tags anymore.

I really don’t know when this change was implemented. As far as I can tell, nothing has changed at the ConTeXt end, so it appears that MetaPost is now directly parsing the postscript labels using TeX. Nonetheless, this means that there is one less thing to worry about while learning and using Metapost. Yay!

A few years ago, I came across impressive, which is a python script that adds extra oomph to presentations. It uses openGL for effects like highlight boxes, spotlight effect, and overview pages. If you haven’t used it, I’d definitely recommend to give it a try. I don’t use it personally as I find it to be a bit slow and unreliable, but I like the options that the script provides. So, I thought that it would be useful to implement these effects in TeX.

Since I first came across this script, I thought that it will be useful to add some of these presentation features to my workflow. It has taken a while to get around to actually do that.

The feature that I liked the most is the overview page: at the end of the presentation, show the thumbnails of the slides, and if someone has any question, you can click on the thumbnail and go to any slide in the presentation. In fact, I’d prefer not to show all the slides, but only the important ones (like the start of a new section).

Thanks to Wolfgang Schuster and Hans Hagen, I am happy to announce the overview module that provides this feature. I have yet to write the complete documentation, but since it is the new year, I thought that I’d at least annouce the module. The basic usage is as follows:

The \placeoverviewpage macro creates the overview slide. The easiest way to explain the output is through an example.

The final page of this file is:

Clicking on one of the rectangles takes you to the corresponding page. Check out the complete PDF file.

The only caveat in using the module is that you can only create a thumbnail of a numbered head. Thus, unnumbered heads like subject, subsubject, etc. do not work. If you want to create a thumbnail of a unnumbered head, the best way is to declare it as a numbered head but do not display the number. For example:

So, American Express wants to send me an HTML formatted email. Fine. But why include the one line plain text blurb? Just omit it and let me, and others like me who prefer plain text email deal with it. Had I not been expected this email, I might have just deleted it without looking at the HTML version of it. Sigh!

It is part of typesetting folklore that Donald Knuth was so upset on seeing the galley proofs of The Art of Computer Programming that he decided to write a computer program that followed the traditions of computer typesetting. And, hence, TeX was born.

For anyone who has to typeset math, TeX is the next best thing to sliced bread. I have been using TeX (in fact, LaTeX exclusively) to submit journal articles to IEEE journals. But it appears that in the race to become more adapted to online publishing, many journals are changing their publishing tools. And, in the case of IEEE, it appears that TeX is no longer in their tool chain.

I first noticed that something was amiss, when I was proof reading the galley proofs of a paper that was to appear in IEEE Transactions of Information Theory. I used \mathscr from the rsfs package to denote sets (as it is more ornate than \mathcal). The paper had an expression

\sum_{q \in \mathscr Q} ...

In the galley proof, the script Q in the subscript was of normalsize, rather than scriptsize. So, I pointed that out in my corrections. In the corrected version, the script Q was of a size between normalsize and scriptsize, which a comment from the typesetter that “we cannot make it smaller”. It is at that time that I realized that they were not using TeX. In fact, all mathematical symbols were inserted as images, which has two consequences:

It throws accessibility out of the window. These days I read most papers on my iPad. It is a pain to annonate images (normal tools like highlight, underline, do not work with images).

It increases the file size by a factor of 10. Just take a look at the average filesize for papers in the current issue (where the filesize is 2MB to 10MB) and early access papers (which are author preprints before they have been processed by the journal; for these the average filesize is 500-600kB).

Last month I went through another round of painful proof reading of galley proofs for a paper that is to appear in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. Again, all the math was converted to images, and the niceties of TeX, like the correct vertical location of : in \coloneqq were lost.

As an author, publishing in IEEE has become more painful for me (due to the typographic errors introduced by whatever software IEEE is using). As a reader, reading IEEE papers has become more painful for me (as I have to download papers that are 5x times bigger in size, and have math typeset as embedded images). Oh well, the irony of IEEE not accepting documents with Type 3 (bitmap) fonts is not lost on me.

This whole process makes me wonder, do we still need big publishers in this day and age of online publishing. Why should we, the authors that generate the content; the reviewers who verify it; the editors who carefully curtail it, offer our voluntary services to a big publisher like IEEE when we get nothing in return (no copy editing, no free open access). I wish I were in a field where I could publish exclusively with good publishers like SIAM and ACM (I have published once with SIAM; they actually copy edited the content and gave me the final TeX files when they were done), or in online journals like JMLR.

Did you always want to learn ConTeXt, but did not know where to start? I have written a git-based tutorial that should help you get started.

The idea of the tutorial is to start with an empty document, and add features one-by-one. Each git commit corresponds to one small change in the document, and includes pointers to the documentation corresponding to that change. Continue reading →

Separation of content and presentation is one of the selling points of TeX over word-processors. Strictly speaking, TeX is not superior compared to word-processors in this regard. It is possible to obtain a clean separation between content and presentation in word-processors (using styles) and it is possible to mix content and presentation in TeX code, as is illustrated by the following example from sample tex file for the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control:

(Seriously, how can anyone recommend writing TeX code like that!) In spite of the falseness of the argument, the general sentiment is true. It is much easier to write structured code (that separates content and presentation) in TeX than in word-processors. A testament to this is the ease with which one can convert a LaTeX document written in the style of one publisher house to that in the style of another publisher by simply changing the class file.

However, when it comes to tabular data, TeX, or rather LaTeX, is a mess. Simply browse through the questions tagged tables on TeX.SE if you don’t believe me. In this blog post, I want to argue that a clean separation between content and presentation is possible in TeX. The mess that is LaTeX tables is a limitation of LaTeX, and not of TeX. To illustrate this point, I’ll use ConTeXt and LuaTeX.

Lets start with a simple example.

which was typeset using the following code:

\bTABLE
\bTR
\bTD Course \eTD
\bTD Description \eTD
\bTD Term Taught \eTD
\bTD Enrollment \eTD
\eTR
\bTR
\bTD NAME 101 \eTD
\bTD A description of the course that is typically one paragraph long.
A description of the course that is typically one paragraph long.
A description of the course that is typically one paragraph long. \eTD
\bTD Fall 2010 \eTD
\bTD 45 \eTD
\eTR
\bTR
\bTD NAME 215 \eTD
\bTD A description of the course that is typically one paragraph long.
A description of the course that is typically one paragraph long.
A description of the course that is typically one paragraph long. \eTD
\bTD Winter 2011 \eTD
\bTD 120 \eTD
\eTR
\bTR
\bTD NAME 555 \eTD
\bTD A description of the course that is typically one paragraph long.
A description of the course that is typically one paragraph long.
A description of the course that is typically one paragraph long. \eTD
\bTD Fall 2012 \eTD
\bTD 15 \eTD
\eTR
\eTABLE

The ConTeXt interface is relatively clean. Rows are indicated by \bTR...\eTR and columns by \bTD...\eTD. The names of the command and the user interface is inspired from HTML tables.

So far, there is a clear separation between content and presentation, simply because we haven’t tweaked the presentation at all. Now suppose, I want to typeset the header as white on blue.

Note that the presentation element (how to style the first row) is defined in the document preamble, and the setup can be shared in all the tables that need that particular style. Now, suppose that in addition to the header, we want to remove the vertical lines in the middle of the table.

Continuing this way, suppose we want to change the alignment of cells, say vertically middle align the first column, horizontally middle align the third column, add hyphenation to the second column; and add some offset between the cells.

(I am not arguing that this is a good visual style; just using this as an example without making the use case too complicated). As before, we define a new setups

See, separation of presentation and content need not be difficult in TeX. Let’s see if this approach is flexible to change. Suppose, I don’t like the vertical middle alignment of the first column. I can simply change the \setupTABLE[column][2][align=...] to my liking, and the change will be applied to all tables using the table:style setups. (Contrast this with what you need to do in LaTeX to achieve the same, and you’ll understand why LaTeX tables are considered hard.)

The above examples illustrate a simple example. In a future blog post, I’ll show how one can use Lua to simplify typesetting of complicated tables, while still maintaining a separation of content and presentation.

It has been almost two years since I posted about the main idea of the visualcounter module. I am happy to announce the official release of the module. I have been using this module in my presentations for almost two years without any problems, so I believe that it is stable enough to be released.

At present, the module is available on github and it should be available through ConTeXt garden soon. Look at the documentation to see some of the features of the module (in particular, the "star rating" example based on Jim Hefferon’s article in the Practex Journal).

The module provides six counters. Two of these were created for proof of concept and are not well tested; the remaining four—scratchcounter, mayanumbers, markers, and countdown—are well tested and, hopefully, their interface will not change.

This was my first module that uses the ConTeXt namespace macros. If you peek into the module, you’ll notice that I only define one macro; everything else is handled by the ConTeXt namespace macro \definenamespace.

The other interesting feature of this module is that I use a separate metapost instance for displaying the counters. This avoids conflict with user definitions. For example, if a user decides to change the metapost definition of fill for whatever reason,